I like this take on how to get promoted.
My experience has been that promotions come from finding and doing important work.
Being spoon-fed is fine for juniors but a negative signal for those seeking e.g. staff+ promotions.
I find myself referring too often to the “is it worth the time?” xkcd.
This works best when the person doing the automation is also the person saving the time.
https://xkcd.com/1205/
It’s that time of year again to look at your calendar like Marie Kondo and ask:
“Does this (meeting) spark joy?”
If not: try to cancel or shorten it.
Would love it if people expressing strong opinions about open source declared what project(s) they’ve maintained and for how long. Would help weed out the uninformed.
Strongly agree with “The Move Faster Manifesto”. This matches my experiences at GitHub, Homebrew, Workbrew. You can also be fast and sustainable.
I agree with Sean here. The industry default seems to be “idealistic about engineering, cynical about management”. Things work better if you’re a little cynical about both.
This analysis of Valve’s approach to hardware was really interesting. I have bought all their hardware and will likely buy all the new stuff and this helps explain why.
Using Docker for local development on macOS is like putting a shipping container in your garden instead of buying a cupboard from IKEA.
18 December 2025
I’ve been following what Justin Searls has been doing with his blog for some time. He’s been leaning into the “POSSE” (Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) philosophy more and more. In practice, this looks like building your own version of a single-serving social network on your own site and exposing RSS/Atom feeds to other services to consume. Justin recently released POSSE Party which makes this easier by cross-posting to various social networks. I’ve complained for a while about (anti)social networking so I’m always up for new ways to use social networking less.
I’ve added “thoughts” to my website. If these work correctly, they will be cross-posted to various social networks. Thanks to Justin Searls’ POSSE Party for enabling this.
09 December 2025
The process of software estimation is frustrating for software engineers and those who consume their estimates. Consumers often ask “why can these software engineers not just tell me when it will be done?”.
24 October 2025
In tech, 3 years is often considered a “long tenure”. We maintain open-source projects for 2 years, then burn out. We start habits, lose momentum and quit.
21 October 2025
Interviewed by Software Engineering Daily17 October 2025
Interviewed by Breaking Change - Hotfix podcastAlso available in swear-free/bleeped version on The Changelog and Friends podcast There will be bleeps.
09 October 2025
gem.coop was announced on Monday. As part of that announcement it was mentioned that I was helping gem.coop set up a governance process, continuing the work I’d first started helping with on RubyGems.
07 October 2025
Interviewed by GitHub Podcast29 September 2025
Interviewed by Emanuel Maiberg on 404 Media26 September 2025
When I first joined GitHub in 2013, there was no engineering management. They had people in engineering leadership roles (some with titles, some without) but no dedicated managers to check in with regularly. Initially I thought this was great. Over time, I realised it was actually pretty terrible. As a result, when I started my own company and was a manager for the first time, I wanted to ensure we provided “minimum viable engineering management”. What this meant was providing the necessary support and monitoring infrastructure to ensure great performance while letting managers, present (me) and future, spend most of their time on individual contributions.
24 September 2025
There’s ongoing discussion about recent changes to access in the RubyGems GitHub organisation. If you need context, first read Open Source Turmoil: RubyGems Maintainers Kicked Off GitHub. My goal is to share contribution data to help inform the conversation.
20 August 2025
Interviewed by Noah Bovenizer on The Stack03 June 2025
At the time of writing (June 2025), the prevailing view in the software industry is that LLM-powered AI is either completely useless or will imminently destroy all software engineering jobs. As you might expect, the reality is somewhere in between. In this post, I’ll share my journey with LLM tooling, from reviewing an early, internal alpha of GitHub Copilot to my current daily usage of Cursor, ChatGPT, and the latest Copilot offerings. My perspective is that of a startup founder (of Workbrew) and long-time open source software maintainer (of Homebrew)
22 May 2025
Interviewed by Sage Lazzaro on LeadDev22 May 2025
Interviewed by Open Source Ready Podcast20 May 2025
Interviewed by Open Source Initiative15 April 2025
In the last two years building Workbrew (a remote-first, enterprise Homebrew startup) I’ve hired 5 engineers (and a hybrid PM/EM). This has been my first time being a “hiring manager”. This post explains how I interview and why I do it how I do.